"I received a letter this morning from Jennifer Daniel Collins, an attorney at Faegre & Benson that represents The National Pork Board. It stated, for the most part, that my use of the phrase "the other white milk" violates their trademark on the phrase "the other white meat." As such, they've demanded that I remove the shirt, demanded that the image of the shirt be removed from any site I know of, demanded that I destroy any shirts that exist with the logo and demand that I not at any point in the future use the phrase in a commercially profitable way."

OpenStreetMap is now set to hit the streets of North American. The project is exactly what it sounds like - designed to provide free geographic data. Users get together with GPS's, physically map out a city, then upload their data to a common database.

"We’re talking about developing your online properties. We’re talking about creating new campaigns to drive links and revenue. When we say “Do it Fucking Now”, we’re talking about those tasks that you keep putting off which, when completed, will start putting more money in the bank.

A new startup, ReputationDefender, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender's modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

Danny Sullivan announced that he'll chair the SES NYC and SES San Jose conferences in 2007, after all. He just worked out an agreement for this with Incisive.

In short, I'll be chairing the SES NY 2007 show, co-chairing the SES SJ 2007 event and participating in the SES Chicago 2007 conference. Aside from this, I also intend to continue writing about search via a new search blog of my own plus do some events on my own.

Software engineer Matt Cutts wields what Webmasters call the "Google death penalty"--getting dumped from the world's largest search engine. Even some of the world's most visible brands have earned the wrath of Cutts